I'M BACK!

Hey y'all, sorry for going AWOL. Just got back from an amazing few weeks in South Africa. Among the highlights of my trip was seeing Hugh Masekela perform on a gorgeous, rocky beach in Cape Town in the late-afternoon sun to a very small but energetic crowd. The music was electrifying. The vibe was joyful and the whole scene gave me, as an outsider, an exciting glimpse of what the new South Africa looks like. (Or rather, what a a particular multi-racial, middle-class segment looks like, but more on that later.) Check out the great pics my wife took...

The sound of Masekela's trumpet, and his voice, are very close to my heart. When I was a little kid in Seattle, there was always South African music playing in my house. My parents are from SA, though they left in the Sixties. So I was exposed to a lot of stuff like Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) and the soundtrack to the musical King Kong. Not so much Hugh, but by the time a pal in college hipped me to Masekela's 60s work, The Lasting Impressions of Ooga Booga, my ears were already open to South African jazz.

The beach where the concert was held is called Oudekraal, just south of Camps Bay on the Atlantic Seaboard. Those majestic mountains in the background are known as the Twelve Disciples.

The crowd was feeling it! I was happy to see that it was a mostly black and "coloured" audience. I had only been in the country for a few days at this point, and I was still trying to make sense of the place. (Cape Town is a majority "coloured" city: 48% "coloured," 31% black, and 18% white. Whereas South Africa as a whole is about 80% black.) A couple of days earlier, we went to another concert in a nearby wine town called Stellenbosch -- singer/songwriter Vusi Mahlasela and multi-racial pop outfit Freshly Ground -- and the crowd was much more white. Also, according to an article I read in the Mail & Guardian, the very popular outdoor concert series at Kirstenbosch, South Africa's premier Botanical Gardens, draws remarkably few non-white faces.

Wandering the city centre or the waterfront, you see people of all races -- it's not that different than New York. But the reality is that the vast majority of the city's non-white population live in grinding poverty in Cape Flats townships like Langa, Nyanga, Guguletu, and Khayelitsha. And the R140 ($20) or so that I paid for the concert ticket is an unimaginable luxury to most Cape Town residents.

It's an incredibly complex and interesting and heartbreaking and inspiring place, and I am still trying to digest it all. Hope you enjoy these photos of the Masekela show, courtesy of Mrs. Biscuits...

Lots of pretty ladies in South Africa...